Electricsheep sends the video to mplayer via a (standard input) pipe, so something like this more closely tests mplayer. This plays for me, which makes me think the problem is in electricsheep itself rather than mplayer.

I looked inside the electricsheep.c code and it appears to launch a child process which runs 'mplayer -' (waiting for input from stdin) and then feeds it the .avi files. But something goes wrong, possibly an incompatibility between today's mplayer and how this old electricsheep code expects to behave.

I tried compiling from source as it advises on the electricsheep.org website, which apparently uses something other than mplayer to render. It has a lot of arcane dependencies such as libGLee, libgtop, tinyxml, and wxGTK-2.9. Even though I did a lot of legwork and even some code changes, I ultimately failed to get it to compile:

This is either a bug in the libwx_baseu-2.9.so library (since it was just recently emerged on the same system with the same version of gcc), or perhaps this problem can be fixed by linking another library from somewhere that I am unaware of which is not in the electricsheep Makefile. However I was successful in building the electricsheep binary, but it didn't seem to work correctly either. All that happens when I run it is the screen blanks black and a white square appears in the middle, no electricsheep playing.

I'm a little upset with myself on how much time I've spent on this. I'm a believer that old software shouldn't be scrapped just because it is no longer actively being written, but the package does emerge fine, and electricsheep --debug 1 seems to indicate that everything is working and that the .avi file is playing. The problem should be fixable.